Debts to Dr. King : One Man So Touched Many Lives

For Jethro English, it goes back a long way--five decades, in fact. That was when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was just a young boy at the time, first touched his life.

English was then in his mid-20s, poor but ambitious, and studying air-conditioning and refrigeration mechanics at night in hopes of bettering himself. King, the son of English’s pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, often dropped by English’s home to help the struggling apprentice with his math.

“He was only about 9 or 10 then, but he was a real smart boy,” recalls English, now 74 and a retired Atlanta Army depot supervisor. “He was a whiz at math, and he liked to quote you things from all the great books and great men. He impressed you as a kid who was going places.”

He certainly was. And in his now almost legendary passage from child prodigy to preacher to civil rights titan and one of the most commanding figures in 20th Century American history, King touched not just English’s life, but the lives of countless other people, changing their fortunes in ways many of them never dreamed possible.

They are people like Sheyann Webb Christburg, a black Alabama businesswoman who was 8 years old when she first marched with King, and who credits her later success in life to her childhood involvement in the civil rights movement.

They are people like Melvin Calvert, a white South Carolina minister who long denounced King as a “nigger preacher who ought to be preaching somewhere in a nigger church” but who now considers him “my saint and theological father.”

Spiritual Odyssey

They are people like Natsuno Nakamura-Loader, who was drawn to King by a pop record and made a 6,900-mile spiritual odyssey from Tokyo to Atlanta to live in King’s hometown and carry out his dream.

They came to King at different times in their lives, from different backgrounds and by different routes. But they share a common conviction: Without King, who was slain by an assassin 20 years ago next week at the age of 39, their lives might never have been so fulfilled.

On a chilly January morning in 1965, Sheyann Webb left her home in a black public housing project in the small Alabama town of Selma and headed for school, two blocks away.

Sheyann--whose name is pronounced Cheyenne, like the capital of Wyoming--was then 8 years old, a saucy, slender third-grader who wore her hair in pigtails tied with ribbons that fluttered in the morning air.

As she passed twin-steepled Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, she found her curiosity piqued by the sight of several black and white ministers standing in front.

“You didn’t see blacks and whites gathered together in such a friendly manner in those days,” she says. “I stood and watched them, wondering what was going on. When they went inside, I followed them and sat way in the back so I couldn’t be seen.”

About 50 people were gathered in the church, among them the Rev. Hosea Williams, King’s “field general.” He had come to Selma to begin laying groundwork for a major voting rights offensive.

At that time Sheyann did not know Williams or what he was doing there, but she listened raptly to what he had to say. “If you can’t vote, then you’re not free,” he exhorted the crowd, “and if you ain’t free, children, then you’re a slave.”

His words struck a responsive chord in Sheyann. Inquisitive by nature, she had harbored ever-growing doubts about the “Jim Crow” system of racial segregation that relegated blacks to second-class citizenship.

“I wanted to know why, for example, we had to sit on one side of the waiting room in the doctor’s office and whites on the other and why the only water fountain was on their side,” she says. It did not seem fair to her.

Her parents, she says, never gave her satisfactory explanations. Like most blacks in Selma, they seemed to accept their lot and made no waves. But the “freedom fighters”--like King and his lieutenants--were a different breed. They were not afraid to stand up to whites and condemn racial injustices.

Less than two weeks before, she had heard King say in an Emancipation Day address in Selma: “We are willing, and must be willing, to go to jail by the thousands” to win equal rights.

Now, sitting in a back pew at Brown Chapel, she reached a momentous decision in her young life: She would join the freedom fighters.

“I thought I could really learn the facts of life if I could be around them more,” she says.

In the ensuing weeks, she became a familiar figure at the tumultuous series of marches, demonstrations and rallies that began to rock Selma. Usually, she could be seen in the company of her best friend and next-door neighbor, Rachel West, who was one year older than Sheyann and who also had decided to enlist in the movement.

King made the two young girls his pets. He would place them at his side in marches or sit them on his lap at mass meetings in Brown Chapel. He also let them sit in on closed-door strategy sessions. At one such huddle, he personally taught them the chant: “What do you want?” “Freedom!” “When do you want it?” “Now!”

“I considered Dr. King my best pal,” she says. “He seemed like such a special person. Eventually, I looked on him as if he were Jesus.”

Her parents had objected to her involvement in such activities at first--especially after they learned she often skipped school to take part. “You want to grow up to be dumb?” her father once raged at her.

“No,” she said, shaking her head, “but it don’t do no good to be smart if you still be a slave.”

Under such logic, they soon relented. In fact, they became a part of the movement themselves, and for Sheyann’s 9th birthday in February, 1965, they joined her for the first time in a march.

“I was so proud of them that day,” she says.

As a young activist, Sheyann suffered many fearful moments. At one time she was so overcome with dread that she secretly penned her own obituary: “Sheyann Webb, 8 years old, was killed today in Selma. She was one of Dr. King freedom fighters. . . . Sheyann want all people to be free and happy.”

Her most frightening experience occurred on “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965. She was among the more than 500 activists and their supporters who were clubbed, tear-gassed and routed back over the Edmund Pettus Bridge by state troopers and mounted sheriff’s deputies.

“People all around me were bleeding from where they had had their heads cracked open,” she says. “I nearly got trampled by a horse.”

King’s assassination in 1968 devastated her. “When I was told he had been killed, it was like my heart dropped,” she says. “I went upstairs to my room and put a pillow over my head. I didn’t want nobody to say nothing to me. I felt it was the end of the movement.”

It was not, of course. And Sheyann eventually snapped out of her despondency over King’s death and continued marching.

Today, at 32, she is a college graduate, married and a rising businesswoman and entrepreneur in Montgomery, the Alabama capital.

She is founder and head of a company known as KEEP--for Keep Entertaining Everyday People--Productions, which coordinates conventions, banquets and fashion shows for local community groups and which also operates a program to develop artistic talents of underprivileged youths.

With her husband, Andre Christburg, whom she married in 1982, she also is co-owner of a beauty salon.

“It’s difficult trying to be an entrepreneur, especially if you’re black,” she says. “But Dr. King and the civil rights movement gave me the kind of self-image and burning determination that I know I can make it.”

Times were tough when Melvin Calvert was growing up in a South Carolina mill town during the Great Depression. His father once went for three straight years without drawing an actual paycheck because what he owed the company store invariably amounted to more than his wages.

Calvert, the eldest of four children, was embarrassed by his family’s poverty. On the first day of school after each Christmas, for example, he would lie when the teacher asked the students to tell what they got for gifts.

“I always told them what I wished I had gotten,” he says.

But no matter how humiliating and degrading he found his life, there was one class of people he could always look down on: blacks. “I didn’t have anybody else to be better than,” he says. “I looked on blacks with disdain and had next to nothing to do with them.”

His racial attitudes did not improve as times got better. He gloated when black mill hands were evicted from their company homes to make room for newly hired whites as the buildup for World War II brought the plant back into full production.

Military service did not mellow him either. While serving in the Army in Korea in 1952, he was severely wounded and received a lifesaving transfusion from a black soldier.

“They hooked him up to me and ran the blood directly out of him into me,” Calvert says. “Almost instantly, I began to feel better. When it was over, he said to me: ‘You’re going to be craving a mess of chitlins after this.’ ”

But Calvert returned to combat with his biases intact. “That transfusion didn’t take away any of my prejudices,” he says.

The onset of the civil rights movement in the mid-1950s only hardened his hatred of blacks. King, in Calvert’s view, was “Public Enemy No. 1.”

“I just despised everything he was doing,” Calvert says. “I thought he was tearing up the country. I often referred to him as a nigger preacher who ought to be somewhere preaching in a nigger church.

“I was a field engineer for a textile company then, and when I would return home from work in the evening, I was always wondering what in the hell King had done today. Everywhere he went he seemed to cause trouble.”

Somewhere along the line, however, a curious change began taking place within Calvert. Although he continued to denounce King in public, privately he found himself increasingly attracted to what the black leader had to say. This hidden side of himself caused him no end of agony.

“I was listening to King secretly on the TV or the radio and saying to myself: ‘My God, this man’s not talking for just one race, he’s talking for poor white people just as much as black people,’ ” Calvert says.

“I started seeing his speeches as profound biblical sermons. When I read his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ I wept--and I don’t weep easily. In 1964, when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, I listened to the news with a feeling of deep satisfaction.

“But I didn’t know how to talk about it with anybody--not even my wife or my closest friends. Outwardly, I was the same as I’d always been. But inwardly, I was going through a painful change.”

Then one day in 1966, a black mill employee told Calvert of the travails his son and daughter-in-law had experienced on their trip from Washington, D.C., to South Carolina for a family wedding.

“He told me how they would stop to have their car serviced but weren’t allowed to use the restrooms,” Calvert says. “As he told the story, tears ran down his face, although he was making no crying noise.

“Pretty soon, I walked away from him as if I had to go to the toilet. What I actually was looking for was a place to cry without being seen. His story really got to me. He told me about something I had known about and condoned all my life. But in that moment, I suddenly saw the whole evil of racism . . . and it was like having a conversion--a conversion that took place through King.”

The following year, after considerable soul-searching, Calvert decided to give up his career in the textile industry and go into the ministry. He was then 39 years old and never had felt an urge for a religious vocation before. His father and mother had not been churchgoers, and he had not been baptized or become a member of a church until he was 25.

But now, thanks to King, he felt a calling.

He talked the idea over with a former pastor, explaining to him that King had led him to his decision. “He didn’t paint a rosy picture at all,” Calvert says. “In fact, he told me: ‘You’re going to catch hell.’ But he didn’t put down the idea either.”

In 1968, Calvert returned to college for a year’s preparatory study in philosophy and religion and then enrolled in the seminary at the Candler School of Theology in Atlanta.

Since his ordination in 1973, he has served as pastor of Methodist churches in the South Carolina communities of Spartanburg, Columbia, Greenville and Lancaster. He currently is pastor of Trinity United Methodist Church in West Columbia.

As his former pastor predicted, his ministerial career has not been without trouble. He was forced out of one church because of his racial beliefs and was hounded at another by bigots who, among other things, killed his pet German shepherd and tore down his mailbox. “Preacher,” said an anonymous note, “remember your mailbox and dog--some people don’t want you hear (sic).”

“That misspelling was scary, because it suggested a mentality that could do you harm,” he says.

His latest church, which has about half a dozen blacks, has been an oasis of acceptance by comparison--although here, as elsewhere, there are some members who object to the picture of King he keeps over the desk in his study.

“I’ve always kept a picture of King over my desk,” he says. “I couldn’t do without it. He is my saint and theological father. It hasn’t always made me popular with certain individuals. . . . But I can’t fall out with those people because I remember where I used to be and how long it took me to get where I am now. It’s a journey across very troubled waters.”

Elzora Schaffer sits in a corner of the plastic-covered red sofa in the living room of her modest South Side Chicago home and gazes reverently at the simple framed picture of King on the wall behind her.

Her brown hands, wrinkled with age and roughened by decades of toil in Mississippi’s cotton fields and the kitchens of wealthy white Chicagoans, are folded gracefully in her lap. Her dark eyes glow as if with an inner fire.

The picture, clipped from a newspaper magazine, went up shortly after King’s assassination in 1968. It has held the place of honor in her living room ever since.

“He was a wonderful man,” she says of King with unabashed pride. “All the black people here loved him very much. There was so much Jim Crow in Chicago. But he got the blacks to moving and helped change all that.”

She recalls how King, in a step to extend his campaign into the North, came to Chicago in 1966 and declared a “war on slums.” To dramatize his cause, he moved into a tenement flat in a battered black neighborhood with his wife and children.

In the following months, he crisscrossed Chicago holding rallies, forming tenant unions and staging marches that attracted national attention.

To her regret, Schaffer--who was then in her early 50s and had lived in Chicago for more than two decades since migrating there from rural Mississippi--never got to see him in person or march with him.

“I was at a rally once where he was supposed to be,” she says. “A lady kept saying over the loudspeaker: ‘He’s coming, he’s coming!’ He got there all right, but something came up, and I had to leave before he arrived.”

Nevertheless, she was fired by his example. She plunged into an active schedule of community organizing--neighborhood improvement campaigns, block-safety programs and voter registration drives.

She well knew what King meant when he told Chicago audiences that the struggle for justice and equality was not over because blacks had won civil rights and voting rights bills in Congress.

“Chicago was the most prejudiced city you’ve ever seen back then,” she says. “Black people sometimes never saw it all unless they got out of their neighborhoods. My husband and me once went downtown and heard this girl singing real nice inside a bar on State Street. We decided to go in and listen to her, but they wouldn’t let us in. No blacks allowed, they said.”

Now widowed and 76, she has not slowed down. She heads her block club, is president of a neighborhood advocacy group known as the Organization of New City and is a member of a citywide black youth development organization.

The wall around King’s picture in her living room is filled with more than a dozen awards and certificates of achievement for her community service.

“Dr. King always inspired you to be more than you are,” she says. “I always tell my grandkids about how good he was to blacks and to poor people and to everybody. I tell them: ‘See this man here? I want you to be honorable like him and don’t let people run over you. He always fought for right and wanted us to be like him.’ ”

As a college student in the 1960s, James Karantonis was a rebel without a cause.

School bored him; he already had flunked out of one college and was on the verge of flunking out of another. He did not have the foggiest idea of what he wanted to do in life, and he seemed to have a knack for making himself unpopular with his fellow students--usually over the issue of race.

At his first school, the University of Baltimore, he fell out with his fraternity brothers over his habit of playing “big brother” to the black kids on the block and inviting them inside the frat house for sodas.

At his second school, Concord College in West Virginia, his native state, a gang of jocks slashed the top and tires of his convertible sports car and beat him senseless for having the audacity to entertain blacks in his dormitory room.

Then, on a day in late March of 1965, Karantonis cut a sociology class to watch the triumphal climax of King’s Selma-to-Montgomery march on television at the student center.

King, standing in front of the Alabama state Capitol, gave one of his most memorable speeches. In it, he acknowledged the gains of the civil rights movement thus far but said: “We are still in for a season of suffering.”

Then, in a stirring peroration, he added: “However difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth crushed to the earth will rise again. . . . How long? Not long . . . because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. How long? Not long, because mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Karantonis, who had never paid much attention to King before, was spellbound.

“That speech seemed to transcend all the mundane pettiness of what I saw in the world, to say something that was so noble and so right that I felt as if I had been born again,” he says.

From then on, he knew what his life’s work would be: He did not see himself as a street protester, but somehow he would work for the cause of civil rights.

The road was not easy. He soon flunked out of college again, was drafted into the Army and spent two years as a medic in stateside hospitals.

After completing his tour of duty, he earned an undergraduate degree in 1970 at Morris Harvey College in Charleston, W. Va., and decided to pursue graduate studies in Afro-American history at Howard University, a historically black college in Washington.

Howard, however, was not the beloved community he thought it would be. Black militancy had seized the campus, and Karantonis frequently ran into reverse racism.

“There was a sign I’ll never forget in the school lounge that summed up the campus mood: ‘Black is belligerent,’ ” he says. “The student newspaper would take a picture of any interracial couple on campus and put it on the front page with a message to shun these people. There was another white guy in class with me, and we were often accused of being in the school just because the tuition rates were lower.”

Nevertheless, Karantonis managed to graduate in 1972 and finally launched the career he had been envisioning.

His first full-time job was as education director of the state Human Rights Commission in West Virginia. He earned a reputation on the job as a champion of affirmative action, forcing many a reluctant state agency to adopt a program for minority hiring by threatening to have its federal aid withheld unless it complied.

He then moved up to a post with the federal Civil Rights Commission in Washington. Among other things, he investigated causes of the 1980 civil disturbances in Miami and made a study of minority hiring practices in the nation’s high-tech industries.

In 1984, he was loaned out from the Civil Rights Commission to head the Washington office of the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday Commission, a 31-member group headed by King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, to organize and oversee commemorative events for the holiday.

“It was a dream job,” he says.

And when he later lost his job with the Civil Rights Commission as a result of personnel cutbacks, he hired himself out as a private consultant to the King holiday commission and set up a project known as “Freedom Trail” to help promote King’s birthday.

Among other things, the project produced a two-sided poster that goes out each year to schools, community organizations, churches, labor unions and other groups. On one side is a colorful montage of historic moments in King’s career set against a map of America; on the other a series of recommended activities for celebrating King’s birthday.

“This is my work of love,” Karantonis says of the poster, which he views not only as an educational tool in his campaign to promote the King holiday but as a personal tribute to the man who changed his life so dramatically.

Taylor Rogers never needs to be reminded of his debt to King.

“Martin Luther King literally laid down his life for me,” says Rogers, 62, president of Local No. 1733 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Memphis, Tenn.

Twenty years ago, Rogers was one of 1,300 black Memphis sanitation workers who went on strike for higher wages, better working conditions and union recognition. News pictures of the workers wearing “I Am a Man” signboards are well-known icons of the civil rights struggle of that era.

“We were second-class citizens,” he says. “We worked from ‘kin to kain’t.’ That means you started in the morning and stopped when the white man said stop, even if it was 8 o’clock at night, and you had been working since before that time in the morning.

“We weren’t making but about $1 or $1.05 an hour. It was hard to feed your family.”

King, responding to the appeal of a group of black Memphis ministers, came to the aid of the strikers. It was a fateful decision. A march he led on March 28 with 6,000 protesters quickly ended in a debacle after young blacks, flouting King’s nonviolent methods, broke off from the procession and began smashing windows and looting stores.

On April 3, King returned to Memphis to lead a second march. That evening he delivered his prophetic “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech. The next day, he was cut down by an assassin’s bullet as he emerged from his room at the Lorraine Motel to go to dinner.

“I was stunned when I heard the news,” Rogers says. “Dr. King had given us a lot of hope. Until he entered the picture, there was real concern that the strike might be broken. Quite a few of the guys had already begun drifting back to work.”

In death, however, King was able to accomplish readily what in life would have proved harder to do. In the mood of collective guilt that permeated Memphis’ white community after the assassination, the city fathers swiftly yielded to virtually all of the strikers’ demands.

Today, the union is among the strongest in Memphis and boasts a membership of 7,000, including school board employees, corrections officers, public works personnel and health care workers as well as sanitation workers.

The union’s headquarters occupy an imposing two-story brick building on historic Beale Street, with a magnificent oil painting in the reception area of King stretching out a hand over a range of golden-topped mountains.

Each year, on the anniversary of King’s assassination, the union stages a march in Memphis.

“We’re going to keep King’s dream alive,” Rogers says. “We’ll never bend our backs anymore. What we fought for, and what we got, we’re going to keep.”

Natsuno Nakamura was in a spiritual quandary. How do you resolve your duty to God with your obligations to man? Nobody she knew seemed to have a satisfactory answer.

At her Tokyo church, run by Swedish Pentecostalists, she felt there was too much emphasis on “faith without deeds.” In the community of friends and fellow college students she knew largely through her father, a prominent Tokyo physician and peace activist whom she describes as a “romantic Marxist,” the emphasis was just the reverse.

“I wanted to do something with my faith to make the world a better place,” she says. “Personal salvation was not enough. I believed that the Jesus in me was put there as well to change the world.”

So she started searching for someone who could help her out of her dilemma. She found him, through an odd circumstance, in King.

Her older sister had brought home a Stevie Wonder album with a song by the artist calling for a national King holiday.

“I thought it was interesting that somebody so popular as Stevie Wonder would sing about Dr. King,” she says. “In Japan, popular singers tend to be nonpolitical. They would never have mentioned the name of anybody like Dr. King. I knew little about him then . . . but I said to myself that I wanted to learn more.”

She got some books by King and starting reading. In “Strength to Love,” a collection of his sermons first published in 1963, she discovered the answer to her spiritual longings.

It was the sermon titled “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,” one of King’s favorites. He gave it in 1954 as his trial sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery--his first pulpit and his springboard into the civil rights movement.

Based on a verse in Revelation, it says: “Love yourself, if that means healthy respect. That is the length of life. Love your neighbor as yourself; you are commanded to do that. That is the breadth of life. But never forget that there is an even greater commandment: ‘Love the Lord thy God with all they heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.’ This is the height of life.”

So enthralled was she by King’s words that she decided to write her undergraduate thesis at Tokyo’s Meiji Gakuin University on him and, in 1981, she came to Atlanta for what was to be a two-month research trip.

It has, instead, turned into a permanent stay. She found it irresistible to be able to live and work in the city where King lived and worked and where so many memories of him exist.

She also was charmed by the many former King associates she met during an internship at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, which is run by Coretta Scott King.

What is more, she found a church that met both her spiritual needs and social concerns. Ironically, it is not King’s own Ebenezer Baptist Church but the nondenominational Chapel Hill Harvester Church, which boasts a multi-ethnic, interracial congregation of 10,000 members and has a reputation for social activism.

“I liked the people at Ebenezer but not the sermons,” she says. “What was emphasized in the sermons was: ‘White people don’t do this for us; that’s why we don’t make any progress.’ That may be true, but what I believe is that I’m the one who must do for me. I’m the one who must be involved to change society.”

In Atlanta, she also met the man she eventually married: Ned Loader, a doctoral student at Emory University.

Now 29, she is an interpreter and translator and a Japanese language instructor at a suburban school for children of Japanese businessmen in the Atlanta area.

“I teach nonviolence there, and it works, although I get a lot of complaints from the parents,” she says. “They want me to teach their children to be more competitive.”

She also is working on a master’s degree in early childhood education at Georgia State University.

“If I had never found Dr. King, I would have been like a nearsighted person--living somehow without seeing too well but never knowing if that person out there is smiling at you or not,” she says.

“But Dr. King is like the right eyeglasses or contact lenses that, when you put them on, you say: ‘Wow, this is living, and I can keep this dream alive.’ ”

Jethro English opens a family album and pulls out the snapshots and memorabilia of King that he and his wife, Auretha, have saved over the years.

Among the items is a yellowed clipping from the Atlanta Daily World, the black community newspaper. The article tells of the first prize that King, then an 11th-grade student at Washington High School, won at an Elks’ oratory contest.

English looks at the earnest young face with the penetrating almond-shaped eyes in the photograph accompanying the article and sighs wistfully.

The kid who helped him with his math and quoted from all the great men had certainly become a great man himself.

“We won’t have another M. L. King, certainly not in my lifetime,” he says. “He was a plain, ordinary, called-by-God preacher who took his job seriously and wanted to be identified with the poorest of the poor, the lowest of the low. Someone like that comes along only every once in a while.”